The Ordinary, Extraordinary Cemetery

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Sometimes a chat with your local butcher can lead you down a very curious rabbit hole and that is exactly what happened to this week's returning guest, historian Joy Giguere, on this latest episode of the Ordinary Extraordinary Cemetery podcast. Some history is easy to miss until you know what you’re looking for. In the 1920s, a surge of organized intolerance swept through American towns. It showed up in parades, in politics, and in the way some communities marked their dead. This episode traces how that movement tried to make itself permanent, and what the grave markers left behind can still teach us today.

Joy has been looking at archival records, historical newspapers, and local histories to understand how extremism became normalized, and in some cases, has been engraved in stone.

This episode is heavy. It’s important. And it’s not ancient history. 

Content note: This episode discusses historical racism and extremism in the 1920s. It is presented for educational purposes. We do not promote or glorify hate. This episode examines primary sources to understand how organized intolerance functioned in the 1920s.

If you have come across grave markers such as we discuss in this episode and you would like to pass the information along to Joy for archival purposes, you can reach her at: [email protected]

Need an Ordinary Extraordinary Cemetery Podcast tee, hoodie or mug? Find all our taphophile-fun much here: https://oecemetery.etsy.com

Family Tales: A free printable, is now available! Gather 'round the table and dig into your roots! This interactive family history game is perfect for holidays, reunions, or just because. Ask, listen, and laugh your way through generations of stories and secrets. https://drive.google.com/file/d/1UT_R56qEwNTIxIBrTy8KFyVmGnFOe7g8/view?usp=sharing

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This week on the Ordinary Extraordinary Cemetery, Jennie and Dianne are joined by one of their favorite living historians MJ Henion, to unravel a Civil War mystery that still haunts historians today.
Meet Brigadier General Richard B. Garnett, a Confederate officer whose story ends at Pickett’s Charge… or does it? Though he has a memorial marker in Virginia’s historic Hollywood Cemetery, no one knows for certain if his remains ever left the battlefield at Gettysburg.

From his early years before the war to his final moments leading men into that doomed charge, MJ brings Garnett’s Ordinary Extraordinary life, and death, into vivid focus.

Need an Ordinary Extraordinary Cemetery Podcast tee, hoodie or mug? Find all our taphophile-fun much here: https://oecemetery.etsy.com

Family Tales: A free printable, is now available! Gather 'round the table and dig into your roots! This interactive family history game is perfect for holidays, reunions, or just because. Ask, listen, and laugh your way through generations of stories and secrets. https://drive.google.com/file/d/1UT_R56qEwNTIxIBrTy8KFyVmGnFOe7g8/view?usp=sharing

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When the 2008 recession upended Eric Anderson’s career, he never imagined the detour would lead to cemetery service. But that’s where he found work that truly mattered. After walking through personal loss herself, his wife Megan joined him, bringing a heart for steady, compassionate guidance in life’s hardest moments.

Through prayer and perseverance, the Andersons were led to Thomasville, North Carolina, where they took on a big challenge: restoring Holly Hill Memorial Park. Brick by brick, conversation by conversation, they’ve rebuilt not just operations, but trust, compassion, and dignity in a final resting place rooted in community and love.

To learn more about Holly Hill Memorial Park, visit their website: https://www.hollyhillcemetery.com/

Need an Ordinary Extraordinary Cemetery Podcast tee, hoodie or mug? Find all our taphophile-fun much here: https://oecemetery.etsy.com

Family Tales: A free printable, is now available! Gather 'round the table and dig into your roots! This interactive family history game is perfect for holidays, reunions, or just because. Ask, listen, and laugh your way through generations of stories and secrets. https://drive.google.com/file/d/1UT_R56qEwNTIxIBrTy8KFyVmGnFOe7g8/view?usp=sharing

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On this episode of the Ordinary Extraordinary Cemetery podcast, Jennie and Dianne are joined by author Gigi Berardi to talk about "Bianca’s Cure", her fact-driven historical novel about Bianca Capello, who in real life was famed for her beauty, but Gigi’s Bianca is a scientist centuries ahead of her time,  hunting a malaria cure with the herb artemisia. 

Malaria, took the lives of many in Italy in the 14th century, including several members of one of Italy's most famed royal families, the Medicis. The same family Bianca married into. When her husband, the Grand Duke Francesco de’ Medici died, they found arsenic in his bones. And Bianca? Her body was never found. Denied a Medici tomb, she likely vanished into an unmarked grave.

Listen in for a fascinating discussion of medicine, politics, passion, and mysteries beyond some of Italy's most Ordinary Extraordinary graves.

Purchase your copy of "Bianca's Cure" here: https://gigiberardi.com/

Need an Ordinary Extraordinary Cemetery Podcast tee, hoodie or mug? Find all our taphophile-fun much here: https://oecemetery.etsy.com

Family Tales: A free printable, is now available! Gather 'round the table and dig into your roots! This interactive family history game is perfect for holidays, reunions, or just because. Ask, listen, and laugh your way through generations of stories and secrets. https://drive.google.com/file/d/1UT_R56qEwNTIxIBrTy8KFyVmGnFOe7g8/view?usp=sharing

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This week, Jennie and Dianne are "digging" into some truly Ordinary Extraordinary recent news stories from cemeteries across the US. First up, Lafayette, Colorado, where a local cemetery has run out of burial space, leaving families in a lurch despite owning plots. Then, on to the stunning shores of Lake Superior in Minnesota, where a historic pioneer cemetery is literally losing its graves to erosion, bringing skeletal remains to the surface and sparking a fight for state funding to save it. And finally, a story published by Smithsonian Magazine unearths a tale from the early 2000s in Chicago's historic Burr Oak Cemetery, where four men were busted for desecrating graves for profit, all thanks to a very specific type of moss! 

You can find the links to each of the articles here: 

https://www.cpr.org/2026/03/27/lafayette-cemetery-overcrowding/

https://www.cbsnews.com/minnesota/news/scandia-cemetery-erosion-lake-superior-duluth/

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/how-a-tiny-clump-of-moss-helped-the-fbi-solve-a-grave-robbing-case-180988328/

Need an Ordinary Extraordinary Cemetery Podcast tee, hoodie or mug? Find all our taphophile-fun much here: https://oecemetery.etsy.com

Family Tales: A free printable, is now available! Gather 'round the table and dig into your roots! This interactive family history game is perfect for holidays, reunions, or just because. Ask, listen, and laugh your way through generations of stories and secrets. https://drive.google.com/file/d/1UT_R56qEwNTIxIBrTy8KFyVmGnFOe7g8/view?usp=sharing

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Just as Women's History Month wraps up, Jennie and Dianne chat with author Sherry Sky Stuart about her fascinating new book, Forgotten Female Felons. Skye resurrects the stories of women locked up in the Colorado Territorial Prison, kicking off with the first female felon from 1872. With help from original prison records and other resources, she crafts the vivid lives of women like Catherine, a midwife jailed for abortion, or women who faced abuse, addiction, and the privations of poverty.

Forgotten Female Felons illuminates battles that mirror many of today's issues still faced by women. This heartening and raw exploration dives into a sidelined slice of history, proving these women's tales are as legendary as any of their male counterparts and deserve to be remembered and even reimagined.

You can order your copy of Forgotten Female Felons here:   https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/B0F913G91F/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0

Need an Ordinary Extraordinary Cemetery Podcast tee, hoodie or mug? Find all our taphophile-fun much here: https://oecemetery.etsy.com

Family Tales: A free printable, is now available! Gather 'round the table and dig into your roots! This interactive family history game is perfect for holidays, reunions, or just because. Ask, listen, and laugh your way through generations of stories and secrets. https://drive.google.com/file/d/1UT_R56qEwNTIxIBrTy8KFyVmGnFOe7g8/view?usp=sharing

Support the show

Send us a text! We love hearing from listeners. If you'd like a response, please include your email.

Support the show

Send us a text! We love hearing from listeners. If you'd like a response, please include your email.

"For most of history, Anonymous was a woman." — Virginia Woolf    

In this episode of the Ordinary Extraordinary Cemetery, Dianne and Jennie follow a single name etched on a simple marble stone in the Pioneer section of Evergreen Cemetery in Colorado Springs - Lorenda Judd. She rests there alone. No husband, no children beside her. After Lorenda’s death, her family moved on, and the record of her life thinned to almost nothing. What we do know comes filtered through other people: a marriage certificate, a few lines mentioned through her youngest son, the bare facts of a woman who was born in New York in the early 1800s, migrated to Illinois, and later crossed into Colorado Territory as a wife and mother. We don’t have her letters, her opinions, or any account of how she felt about leaving home and building a life on the frontier.

This episode asks what’s lost when women’s stories are reduced to their relationships to the men in their lives, and why that loss matters. Lorenda’s missing narrative isn’t an anomaly; it’s the pattern. Throughout history, women’s lives slip out of the archive, and “ordinary” women become extraordinary precisely because we have to work to see them, and why preserving and amplifying their stories changes how we understand history itself. 

Need an Ordinary Extraordinary Cemetery Podcast tee, hoodie or mug? Find all our taphophile-fun much here: https://oecemetery.etsy.com

Family Tales: A free printable, is now available! Gather 'round the table and dig into your roots! This interactive family history game is perfect for holidays, reunions, or just because. Ask, listen, and laugh your way through generations of stories and secrets. https://drive.google.com/file/d/1UT_R56qEwNTIxIBrTy8KFyVmGnFOe7g8/view?usp=sharing

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Send us a text! We love hearing from listeners. If you'd like a response, please include your email.

Support the show

Send us a text! We love hearing from listeners. If you'd like a response, please include your email.

What dessert would you eat in a cemetery? This week, we're sharing some of your wild and wonderful social media responses to that very question, inspired by the authors of "To Die For A Cookbook of Gravestone Recipes" and "Haunted Virginia Cemeteries"! We're unwrapping a brand new episode that also features classic clips from our chats with Rosie Grant and Sharon Pajka about their fascinating journeys to writing these books. And as if that's not sweet enough, we're giving away copies of both books! Be sure to tune in for all the Ordinary Extraordinary Cemetery fun!

To listen to the full episodes with Rosie and Sharon, follow these links: https://www.theordinaryextraordinarycemetery.com/episode-233-dishes-from-the-dearly-departed-with-rosie-grant/

https://www.theordinaryextraordinarycemetery.com/episode-243-haunted-history-exploring-virginias-cemeteries-with-sharon-pajka/

Need an Ordinary Extraordinary Cemetery Podcast tee, hoodie or mug? Find all our taphophile-fun much here: https://oecemetery.etsy.com

Family Tales: A free printable, is now available! Gather 'round the table and dig into your roots! This interactive family history game is perfect for holidays, reunions, or just because. Ask, listen, and laugh your way through generations of stories and secrets. https://drive.google.com/file/d/1UT_R56qEwNTIxIBrTy8KFyVmGnFOe7g8/view?usp=sharing

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